


Stitches and Seams

by scrambledgreggs



Category: Lemonverse
Genre: Angst, Gen, aristotelian philosophy, lemonverse week, or rather a botched understanding of, philosophy is made up anyways
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:47:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25427911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scrambledgreggs/pseuds/scrambledgreggs
Summary: Lemonverse Week 2020 Day Two: Angst!Newton meets his creator and a strange man who frequents his junkyard on Sundays, neither go as he expects.
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

It had taken Newton months to track him down, even longer to work up the nerve to say hello to him as he left from work that afternoon. He recalled, just that day, shuffling nervously against the pavement across the road as he emerged from the doors of the lab building, pushing back his hair in exasperation. His creator. 

Newton sighed as he sat at the table in his shed, swirling a near-empty can of motor oil around on the table. He remembered his breath catching as he saw him, running across the street to greet him. The man looking up in shock as Newton breathlessly stuck out his mechanical hand.

_“Hi Sir! If I’m not mistaken, you made me.”_

Newton winced at remembering his words. Maybe he came at it too strong. Maybe that’s why he’d been so shocked, why he’d pulled away from him so instinctively. Yet, the man could not deny he knew him: in his shock, he had betrayed recognition.

_“I thought we could catch up, there’s a cafe down the street.”_

The cafe was packed, and the two had sat down at a table by the window. Newton remembered how excited he was, at the time ignoring how the other man looked mortified, glaring out of the window and hiding his face. Newton, at the time, excused it. Maybe he was shy, maybe he was just overwhelmed with emotion? Maybe he’d missed him so much-

_“What is it you want?”_

Newton remembered pausing at the question, the first words from his creator to him. He’d wondered so much while he was searching, and now was struggling with what to start with.

_“Well, I- Um. It’s just that-” he struggled._

_“How are you alive anyway?”_

_“Oh! I can answer that, I remember waking up in a pile of wrecked cars, and my skin was smoking and my hair was standing on end. Not sure what happened, maybe I got struck by lightning,” he mused, before looking him directly in the eyes, “I was hoping that maybe… you… knew?”_

_“No. I don’t.”_

He remembered how the silence from him hung so heavy in the air, and it started to hang heavy in his chest. He clung to the weight, straining to pull it up, maybe he wasn’t there for it? Maybe he was just tired-

_“So where did I come from?” he asked, nervously tapping at the table._

_“I made you. Didn’t you know that?”_

_“Well, sure, but I suppose what I mean is… why?”_

_“Why what? Why did I make you?”_

_“Yeah!”_

Newton wasn’t quite ready to touch the memory yet, like the sore, red flesh around a fresh wound. The heat of the late afternoon poured through the murky window of the shed, prompting him to roll up his sleeves and slough his vest. He traced his fingers along the scar lines that were once fresh stitches that ached as he lifted from the sparking, smoldering wreck of cars. 

_“You were an experiment.”_

_Newton perked up, some new information, straight from the mouth of the man that made him. He was dying to know more._

_“Oh wow! What for?”_

_“Doesn’t matter.”_

_“Oh. Can I ask some other questions?”_

_“Sure.”_

_“So I was missing an arm when I woke up, how did that happen?”_

_“Not my_ _intention_ _,” the man grumbled, “and not my fault it happened, I ran out of time.”_

_“Oh, well that’s ok!” Newton laughed, showing off the robotic replacement he’d built for himself, “I think this works much better.”_

_“Uh huh,” the man grimaced at it._

It stung when he recalled it. He scrutinized the mechanical arm. Maybe, he thought as he squinted at the minute errors and flaws, he wasn’t impressed with it. Maybe, a brilliant maker of things himself, he saw fault where Newton had missed it. Of course, right there, a poorly welded seam, and there, a lumpy spot where the flesh and joint connected, and there-

_“Can I ask something else?”_

_“If you have to.”_

_“I noticed I have a defibrillator installed in my chest instead of a heart, I think that’s real neat, why’d you do that?”_

_“Because I didn’t have anything else, alright?” he bristled._

_“That’s alright,” Newton responded. “It’s a little mis-wired I think, sometimes it thumps when it ain’t supposed to.”_

_“Sure.”_

_“Maybe you could help me out with that?”_

Newton fought getting to the next part of that interaction, instead gulping down the remainder of the motor oil and drawing the dirty cloth curtains of the shack, plunging him into dim, cold shade. He felt the machine in his chest shudder as it pulsed. 

_“No.”_

_“Oh, um…” Newton looked down, caught off guard. “Why… why not?”_

_“Because it’s not worth it.”_

He couldn’t tell if it was his faulty mechanical heart or not, but a pang of pain shot through his chest. 

_“Why not? You can borrow my tools and parts if you want, I figured you know more about me than I do-”_

_“No. I don’t want to.”_

_“Oh… can- can I ask why?”_

_“Because,” he glared at Newton over the table. “You are a failed experiment. I tried making a person, it didn’t work. I’m not going to keep working on something that failed.”_

Newton held his breath and stared at the floor. Maybe he was in a bad mood. He didn’t mean that, right? He wasn’t a… failure, right? Newton’s own words echoed in his brain: “you know more about me than I do.” 

_“But…”_

_“You have a lot of nerve too, you know that? Coming back, telling me what I messed up and showing off what you “fixed”,” he snarled at him._

_“Wh- I didn’t mean to-”_

_“And asking me to fix_ _minor_ _errors like everything about you isn’t completely and totally wrong.”_

He was caught up in the memory now, wishing he could have said something, anything other than the stunned silence that he sat in at the time. 

_“Look around you, you see anybody with missing teeth? Chewed up ears? Defibrillator hearts or robot hands?” he spat, gesturing at each of his imperfections, “_ _that_ _stupid getup?”_

_Everyone in the cafe did look exceedingly normal. His creator too, hair slicked perfectly into place, dressed neatly, clean shaven and crystal clear glasses. Newton shrank in his seat._

_“I’d rather forget you even happened.”_

“So that’s why you chucked me in the junkyard, huh,” Newton choked, welling up. Tears rolled down his cheeks, tasting like wiper fluid. He wished he could have said it to him, expressed his heartbreak, spoke his mind to the man who made him, instead of what he actually did: sat at the table for an hour after he stormed out, getting stuck with the check. The hurt shuddered in his chest, kicking like a burnt out ignition coil. He looked at the papers on the table in front of him, collected pieces of a puzzle that revealed his creator in a portrait of newspaper clippings and pictures. Newton would be lying if he said he hadn’t had a predetermined vision of him, of how meeting him would go. The reality of him, of meeting him, stomped all over, tearing apart the abstract, askew vision and replacing it with harsh, precise reality. All he could feel was the man’s last cold glare into Newton’s eyes, scrutinizing the asymmetry of them as his final act. 

He sighed, letting the shack fall to darkness around him as the sun set behind the pile of cars at the west end of the junkyard, feeling as imperfect and incomplete as he was the day he emerged from them. 


	2. Chapter 2

Newton could hardly work up the strength to get up from his bed, just like every day before since the afternoon at the cafe. He felt the rough cloth of the sheets he’d stitched together grate against the scars that lined his back like a seam ripper as he tried to ignore the distinct sound of somebody rifling around in the junkyard after-hours. 

“C’mon,” he grumbled, “it’s a Sunday… didn’t they read the sign?”

He emerged from the bed, groaning as the mechanical parts in him rattled back into place from their prone position. The sign probably wasn’t still there, he rationalized, and he would probably have to make a new one too. Slipping on his patchwork jacket, he stepped into the dim, chilly junkyard. A cold front was passing through, not lifting his mood any. The cold made his joints stick and his blood feel slow. Burying himself in his jacket, he trudged around to look for the person rooting around in the yard.

It didn’t take him very long, he spied a man off by the west end of the junkyard in a tweed jacket with stuck-up white hair, clumsily ambulating through a gauntlet of jagged, rusty metal. 

“Sir,” Newton called, “you gotta leave! It’s after hours!”

“Ah,” the man turned around, waggling a bottle of soda in his hands, “is it not five o’clock somewhere?”

“What?” 

The man did not elaborate, just continued to climb over miscellaneous trash, heading towards the west end, the pile of cars where Newton came to be. 

“Hey wait!” Newton yelled, chasing after him.

He hurdled over the obstacles, tearing a bit of his jacket on the way. _Great,_ he thought, _another thing to fix._ He mourned the perfect spot of the jacket that used to be, how it would be marred by the stich that would have to mend it. The man was climbing to the top of the pile of cars, setting himself down atop it and crossing his legs.

“You need to get down from there sir! It’s not very safe!”

“No worries, I come here all the time on Sundays.”

“Huh? You do?”

“Well, not always physically of course,” he continued, refusing to elaborate once more, “but it is nice to get out of the house, right?”

“Well, yes… but sir you really oughta get down from there! What if you fall?”

“Then I fall! Not too far a drop, I should be alive after.”

“But what if you get hurt?”

“Then I get hurt! Happens all the time to everybody.”

“But what if…” Newton trailed off, mind racing, “you fall and chip a tooth or break a bone?”

“Then it happens.”

“But whatever breaks will be… messed up after.”

“I’ll still be alive.”

“But sir… why are you even up there if you might get hurt?”

“Oh! The sunset, it’s the best from up here.”

Newton knit his eyebrows together in confusion. The sun was nowhere to be seen, hidden behind a thick layer of clouds. The man stayed firmly put, struggling to open the glass bottle he’d brought with him. Newton sighed, realizing he had no other option than a forcible removal. He climbed up the stack of cars, feeling the cold steel of the body, unfamiliar when not red hot and pouring off smoke. He ascended, coming to the top and standing over the man. 

“I’m sorry for what I have to do sir, but-” 

“Ah, isn’t it lovely?” he mused, looking up from his apparently puzzling beverage at a dismally cold and overcast evening.

“I’m sorry sir, but there isn’t any sunset. Are you... okay?”

“Of course I am my friend,” he said, smiling. “But does the sun stop setting just because there’s clouds in front of it?”

“What? No, sir, it’s after hours and the sign out front says that you can’t be here!”

“Oh yes, the sign. I didn’t see it this time, so I suppose by your logic, the rules are not in effect.”

Newton sucked in a deep breath, fighting off the frustration welling up in him. The man was right by technicality, which was annoying. The man resumed his attempts to open his drink. Newton sighed and sat down next to him, slouching over and watching the world around him slowly grow dimmer. 

“So glad you could join me this time friend.”

“You’re gonna leave after this, right?”

“Of course, it’s only polite.”

“Okay.”

They sat in silence, the man serenely staring at absolutely nothing happening other than it getting colder and grayer. Newton shivered under his jacket, wishing that it was whole as the cold seeped through the patches and seams. 

“Excuse me?”

“Yes sir?”

“Would you mind helping me open this?” he asked, holding out the bottle of soda.

Newton looked at the man quizzically, who would bring a bottle and not a bottle opener? Still, he obliged, prying up the cap with his mechanical arm and handing it back to him. 

“You can keep the cap my friend, my treat.”

“Thanks,” Newton replied, staring at how it was bent by the action of opening the bottle.

“Funny how it seems so purposeless now, right?”

“Huh?”

“The cap. It’s done its job, kept my drink sealed, and now it’s just a piece of metal.”

“Yeah,” Newton said, frowning. “You could say that.”

“All that work that went into finding the metal ore, melting it down, shaping it, coloring it, snapping it onto the bottle, all to be discarded like an afterthought.”

“You’re hitting a little close to home sir,” Newton said, fighting off the urge to well up.

“Are you familiar with the Aristotelian concept of the Four Causes?”

“Wh… what?” Newton said.

“That’s ok. Basically, everything has four “causes”: what it’s made of, what it looks like, what made it, and what it does.”

“Uh huh,” Newton replied, becoming enamored with the man’s words. 

“Like a car, it’s made of metal, was designed by a bunch of engineers, built by robots, and- I’ll let you tell me its end cause.”

“It… drives right?” Newton tentatively answers.

“Yes! It drives. But look around you, can any of these cars drive?”

“...no?”

“Right! They’re still cars, right?”

“Yeah?” Newton was confused as to where the man was going with this.

“The final cause, at many times, is independent from its first three causes. A table may not be used for dining like the IKEA description might say, but for my roommate’s radio projects, or for wedging the door shut when the FBI comes to investigate my roommate’s radio projects.”

“I’m taking these as hypotheticals, right sir?”

“If you choose to! Ultimately, the end cause of a thing, a car, a table, a bottlecap, doesn’t have to be singular or permanent. Try as the material, the design, and the builder might, their creation will take on a life of its own outside of Aristotle’s Four Causes. A car will break and rust out in an automotive graveyard, a table will be used to stop a federal invasion of our apartment, a bottlecap, well... personally I have no need for them, but maybe you might, or might know somebody who might.”

“What if something,” Newton started, “was made on accident?”

“Go on?”

“Maybe… something was made with materials and design in mind, but the maker messed up a whole lot and the final thing was not in line with the design or the materials?”

“Good question my friend! The minute the maker strayed from the initial design or materials, they didn’t know, but a new design had been created, a new formal cause and a new material one too.”

“Huh,” Newton replied, relaxing his shoulders.

“And regardless, as the maker would finish, the thing would become, in a sense, its own.”

“Like the bottlecap?”

“A little. The bottlecap has lost its first final cause - oh that’s confusing - but now it can be whatever it ends up being. I once met a fellow who would turn them into gears.”

“I see,” Newton said, holding onto the cap in his hand. 

“Oh, now aren’t we lucky!” the man said, finishing off the soda bottle.

Newton looked up. The overcast sky had cleared slightly, and beyond the thinning clouds, an impossibly thin sliver of sunlight peeked over the horizon. It was stunning, just like every other sunset they’d seen. The man gently placed the bottle amongst the junk pile, it was its final resting place after all, and started to leave the car pile.

“Hey sir, wait,” Newton said, sitting up.

“Oh, right, trespassing,” he said, holding out his wrists as if to be cuffed, “we’ll just breeze through this then, I’m sure Taylor will understand the call he’s going to get tonight.”

“Oh no, sir, I can’t do that,” Newton said, chuckling a little. “Just wanted to say thank you.”

“Well, you are welcome my friend.”

“Say, you come here every Sunday?”

“Yes, physically. When the weather is right, or wrong.”

“Regardless, sir, you have my permission to visit after hours on Sundays. You seem alright.”

“Thank you! I’ll let you know then.”

“How?”

The man winked, then walked off into the night as it fell. 

“Wait, no seriously sir, how?”

* * *

Newton sat at the table in his shack, looking at the bottlecap in his hands. He debated what to do with it, before inspiration struck him. He whipped out his soldering kit and a box of spare pins. In minutes, the bottlecap took the shape of a badge. He smiled, and walked over to the vest he’d hung in the steel closet by his bed. The pin sank through the leather, adorning the lapel. Cleaning up his work station, he noticed that he’d left the soldering iron on a newspaper clipping he’d left on the table. It burned through the words, leaving holes across paragraphs and pictures. Newton folded it up gently and placed it in the trash.


End file.
